Wait, what?

So, I’m reading Ross Douthat’s latest, agreeing here, disagreeing there, and even getting annoyed and wondering how little-old-me – who’s been sorting this out on this blog forever – can ever get invited into this elevated conversation – when I reach the end and find myself linked – um, okay, sorry and thanks.

(And I had wondered why I had so many new subscribers over there today….)

But that’s not the wait, what. That reaction is to something Douthat quotes David Gibson as saying:

Finally, Gibson concludes, “at some point a Catholic has to believe that a Council (or synod) is at some level a work of the Spirit and not simply a partisan campaign pitting one agenda against another. That is literally un-Catholic and leads only to cynicism, and bad takes.”

And that’s when I think…wait, what?

I….cannot emphasize to you enough how much, over the past few decades, that Biblical studies and study of the development of Church teaching and practice has been translated into a process of “a partisan campaign pitting one agenda against another….” maybe leading to a little cynicism about even the possibility of truth along the way.

My kneejerk response to that is very similar to what I feel when I hear folks who don’t believe for one minute that the Flight into Egypt was an historical event sniffing that ackshually, Jesus was a refugee, you know…

Anyway, my point of disagreement with Douthat has to do with his core notion – in this column at least – that Vatican II was about making the practice of Catholicism easier. Okay, he does qualify this:

The idea was not simply to make Catholicism easier, of course; the hope was that a truer Christianity would flourish once rote obedience diminished.

But then proceeds to point out that the results are what matter, not the stated intentions. I disagree. I think it’s important to get the intentions right – as right as we can, given the fog of history.

And what were the intentions, if not just to “make it easier?” Too much for a mere blog post, but the core of it seemed to be a conviction that vibrant, authentic faith rooted in a free response to God’s invitation – was impeded by legalistic language and practice, as well as by the accretion of tradition and an “outdated” human anthropology and medieval Eurocentricism, blah, blah, blah. Yes, there’s even more – I would suggest the boredom, stupidity and loss of faith of religious professionals played more of a part than we like to admit – as well as other more complex, nuanced, factors, but when you read the documents and those that came afterwards, this is the clear, stated intention.

So when it comes to the Sunday obligation, for example – a focus of Douthat’s column – the precept was still on the books, but of course, no one wanted to speak of it in those terms, not because of the goal of making things easier, but to help Catholics develop motivations for Mass attendance rooted, not in obedience to a rule, but in a desire to respond to God’s invitation.

Read the Dutch or New Catechism – the emblematic post-Vatican II catechetical document – the treatment of the obligation is on p. 320, and is, indeed, called an obligation, but couched language pointing to the growth of a deeper motivation. Christ Among Us – the sourcebook for my – and many others’ – religious education (high school, 1974-78) takes it further, dispensing with that word (p. 243):

So yes, the language and sensibility of “obligation” faded, but my argument is that one of the primary reasons was, not on paper, to coddle, but to understand religious practice as a response rooted in Christian freedom of mature adults who should no longer be treated like children who will only respond to rules.

Forgetting the cold, hard fact, that a lot of time, especially on Sunday morning, we are exactly like children and more of us than probably care to admit it would stay right were are in bed or wherever if it were not for that rule.

Which is something I’ve written about before, specifically in the context of the Friday abstinence. Because when you read those documents, you see this very clearly. I’ll just quote myself here, thanks:

The whole idea of the post-Conciliar changes to penitential fasting and abstinence was to present, as it were, a minimum on paper, with the expectation that the individual, flush with the glory of the Freedom of the Christian (and the Spirit of the Council), would take it from there.

The legal minimalism was supposed to unleash an internal maximalist lurking in all of us who had just been waiting to be treated like an adult instead of a child defined by adherence to rigid rules.…

….In reading Catholic observers of the pre-Vatican II era, we do see concern with a distance between practice and understanding (that was the motive for the Liturgical Movement, as a whole, after all), and the rapidity with which Catholics after Vatican II ditched Friday abstinence without replacing it with any other penitential practice reveals that distance. Long ago, a Catholic blogger recounted his parents’ reaction to the lifting of Friday abstinence – they and their Catholic friends in the neighborhood celebrated by having a huge steak barbecue!

What I see then, is one more example of the misguided nature of the “renewal” of the Church. Instead of truly starting from where people were and what they already practiced, and trying to help people understand that, they moved to a state of minimalism, stripping the hard-to-follow and hard-to-understand stuff away, trusting in an ideal: people, flush in their mature Christian freedom, would just do what the deeper, yet now impenetrable intention of the “rules” had been guiding them toward through the centuries.

Perhaps for some that happened, but for the bulk it didn’t, and the other consequences were dire:

• Loss of Catholic identity in that shared practice
• A shaking of faith as Catholics, who had been presented with these practices as an expression of the solid, unchanging rock of the Catholic faith, were told, in essence: “KIDDING!” What was solid and worth taking seriously? What, that the Church taught, could be trusted?

Now, back to it. I’ll just end with two official documents detailing the changes in practice. They are worth reading, and honestly, when you are even lightly familiar with two thousand years of Catholic thinking and writing on fasting and other penitential practices, the call to go deeper than the minimal and just use that as a starting point that is the center of these documents, is not inconsistent with that tradition.

The mistake – and it was huge – was in, really, changing anything. It shouldn’t have been changed, for it stripped Catholic life of a deep connection to centuries of Catholic practice and was laughably idealistic about human nature.